Thursday opening at Real Art Ways

Real Art Ways
56 Arbor St., Hartford, (860) 232-1006
Dennis Maher: House of the Unmaker
May 17—Aug. 15, 2012.
Opening reception during Creative Cocktail Hour: Thurs., May 17, 6—8 p.m. Admission is $10/$5 Real Art Ways members.

Press release

Dennis Maher’s House of the Unmaker explores the concept of “home” by constructing a narrative about the anatomies of houses. There will be an opening reception for Maher's show on Thurs., May 17, from 6—8 p.m. as part of Real Art Ways' monthly Creative Cocktail Hour. Admission is $10/$5 Real Art Ways members. House of the Unmaker will be on view through Aug. 15.

Maher harvests discarded building materials from sites of urban demolition. The skins of former walls, floors and ceilings are used as layers in his assemblages.

Maher re-imagines the house as a social, material, and psychological construct. House of the Unmaker casts aside the exterior shell of a "home" to reveal an inverse living-scape where walls are not static barriers or dividers, but animate and organic communicators of matter, places, and time.

House of the Unmaker will reconfigure the anatomy of a house, its objects, furnishings, and spaces, at multiple scales. These assemblages are interconnected within a framework of room-like environments.

Dennis Maher is one of the STEP UP 2011 artists. STEP UP is a series of six solo exhibitions open to emerging artists living in New York, New Jersey or New England.

Exhibitions by Dennis Maher have been presented at such venues as Black and White Gallery and Project Space in Brooklyn, NY, Pulse Miami Art Fair, the Pittsburgh Biennial, Galeria Antoni Pinyol in Reus, Spain, Superfront in Los Angeles, CA, The Carnegie Center in Covington, KY, and Burchfield Penney Art Center in Buffalo, NY.

Maher has been selected as the 2012 Artist In Residence at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, NY. He is also a recipient of the Black and White Project Space Prize (2010), a NYSCA Independent Projects Grant (2010), and a MacDowell Colony Fellowship (2008).

His work has been featured in Architect Magazine, on the national radio program Smart City Radio, and on PBS television's Going Green series. Published writings by Maher include "Towards Un-building" in 306090 Sustain and Develop, and "The Nightworks" in Unplanned, Research and Experiments at the Urban Scale, and "Afterlives of St. Gerard's," forthcoming in Architecture Post-Mortem. Maher is currently a Clinical Assistant Professor in the Department of Architecture at SUNY, University at Buffalo, where he has taught since 2004.